A$AP Rocky may be the headline at the moment for Tranmere, but Tacopina is the story
There's been takeover talk in the air at Tranmere Rovers which is very much at odds with their position near the very bottom of the EFL pile.
There are many ways in which a football club can fall from grace, and some will draw more attention than others. When a club collapses under the weight of its own financial contradictions, the resulting fallout will attract a lot of comment, usually in the form of crocodile tears before everything just continues with nothing having changed whatsoever.
But there is also another way. Football clubs can undergo a slow decline over a period of years, invisible to all but those going through it every week. And before you know it, the club that has been falling gently finds that it hits the ground without anyone having paid that much attention. That, it rather feels, is where Tranmere Rovers have been since the pandemic.
Tranmere are currently third from bottom in League Two, and they’ve been here before, although their last decline was nothing like this. In 2014 they fell from League One, relegated by three points after taking just one point from their final five matches of the season. The following season they fell out of the League altogether for the first time since 1921, finishing bottom of League Two for a second successive relegation.
It was not an especially auspicious start to the ownership of Mark Palios, who’d took over the club at the very start of the season from Peter Johnson. And once down, Tranmere took a while to get back up again; three years, during which they were runners-up twice, before beating Boreham Wood at Wembley through the play-offs in 2018.
This ascent didn’t end with their return to the EFL. The following season Tranmere were promoted again, and again through the playoffs. But once in League One the pandemic got to them, curtailing the 2019/20 season just as they were starting to experience an upswing in form which might have kept them up, had it continued. Instead, when it was decided that June to resolve promotion and relegation issues on a points per game (PPG) basis, Tranmere dropped, in 21st place in the table.
Since then, the ongoing decline has been characterised by a slow drift. In their first season back in League Two they snatched the last playoff place, only to lose to Morecambe in the semi-finals. The following season they finished 9th. In 2023 it was 12th, and last season it was 16th. And now this season they’re down in 23rd place in the table off the back of a season which has seen all concerned start to look somewhat nervously over their shoulders at the two clubs that have long been occupying the bottom two places.
This season started reasonably well. It wasn’t very exciting, with just three goals in their opening four matches, but with two narrow wins and two goalless draws they were up to eighth place by the end of August. But since then there has been a collapse. Four wins in 22 League games. Elimination from the two major domestic cup competitions by the end of the first weekend of November, when National League Oldham Athletic beat them in the FA Cup at Prenton Park.
2025 has been mixed but not great, so far. It started in just about the worst way possible, with a 2-0 defeat at Morecambe on New Year’s Day. Supporters will have breathed a sigh of relief with a 1-0 win against Carlisle United three days later. A win and a defeat from consecutive matches against the only two sides below them in the EFL was the ‘mixed’ of their 2025. The not ‘great’ aspect of it has followed this, a 5-1 defeat at Walsall followed by a 2-0 loss at Wimbledon.
This all leaves Tranmere in 22nd place in the League Two table, five points above Morecambe and level on points with Accrington Stanley. Morecambe have only played once in the League since that New Year’s Day match, so it’s difficult to say how likely it is that the gap between the two sides may narrow further in the near future. All we can say for certain is that with 21 games left to play, a five-point gap in no way represents anything that can meaningfully be considered ‘safety’.
But it would be misrepresentation to say that nothing has been going on behind the scenes at the club this season. The news that a group featuring A$AP Rocky—an American rapper and boyfriend, by all accounts—was considering buying into Tranmere first emerged last year. He was reported to be part of an investment group headed by ‘celebrity lawyer’ Joe Tacopina—who represented a certain despotic president of the USA until last year—which was in advanced talks to acquire 80% of the club at a price of £15m, continuing the ongoing recent trend of American investors buying English football and nobody doing anything whatsoever about it.
Except there have already been hitches. The first came just a couple of weeks after the original flurry of press speculation, when one of the co-investors pulled out of the deal, requiring an alternative form of funding to be located as a matter of urgency. The investor who has withdrawn remains nameless, but it is understood that they were behind 30% of the total funding. By December, Palios was telling fans at an online forum that the takeover was still on, although “It's difficult to identify exactly when this will happen”.
The second of these hitches may prove to be tricky for the aforementioned Mr Rocky. With Tacopina representing him, he appeared in court in Los Angeles this week on a charge of firing a gun at a former friend outside a Hollywood hotel in 2021, and the first decision they’ve reached has been to reject a plea deal with prosecutors of a seven-year suspended sentence, three years of probation and a six-month jail term for a guilty plea.
If found guilty after trial, he could face up to 24 years in prison. Tacopina has already confirmed that he plans to call witnesses to testify that a firearm seen on a security video at the heart of the prosecution is a starter pistol that Rocky carried as a prop for security. The decision to go to trial is certainly a high stakes one.
It is believed that the Rocky is not the investor that withdrew from the Tranmere grouping in November, but the question of what happens in the event of being convicted seems like a fair one, unless this is simply a matter of his involvement being similar to that of Tom Brady with Birmingham City; effectively non-existent in real terms beyond attracting publicity and creating a buzz.
And what we can say for Joe Tacopina is that he sure does love to create a buzz. The template for what he wants to do is obvious. The success enjoyed on the pitch by Wrexham over the last couple of years since their Hollywood takeover seems to be convincing others that they can replicate it. Tacopina intends a documentary, and to invite Hollywood celebrities to take an interest in the club for promotional purposes.
It’s not his first rodeo with this sort of thing, either. In 2011 he was part of an American group that bought Roma before selling up and moving on to Bologna in 2014. He stayed there as president of the club before selling up and moving on again, this time to Venezia. This time he stayed until January 2020, and in August 2021 he pitched up again at another Italian club, SPAL.
They were relegated into Serie C in 2023, and there have been persistent rumours concerning who may or may not be actually running the show there since. SPAL are currently 16th out of twenty in one of Serie C’s three regional divisions. Warnings over what a similar decline could mean for Tranmere have already been sounded.
The concern for Tranmere Rovers here should be obvious. Even if we set aside concerns about the state of SPAL at the moment, the idea of this club becoming something of a sideshow. In theory, the attraction is obvious because Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney made it look so easy at Wrexham.
It looks like a dream scenario. For a relatively modest investment, a fanbase will love you to pieces and massage your ego, you can draw an outsize amount of attention to yourself and your new acquisition, and a rapt audience will push up the value of the accompanying documentary. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, the risks should be obvious. First of all, the precariousness of Tranmere’s current position should not be underestimated. The gap between them and Morecambe is five points, while they’re seven above bottom of the pile Carlisle. It’s delicate, but while Tranmere have already proved once that a return to the EFL from the National League is possible, they have also proved that there are no guarantees that it would be immediate.
And what happens should this attempt to make Tranmere Rovers darlings of Hollywood fall flat on its face? If spending is dramatically increased, who would ultimately be paying for it? Tranmere Rovers own Prenton Park, so any new owners will also take ownership of that. Are there any guarantees that this valuable asset will be safe should things take a turn for the worse at the club in the future?
These are important questions to ask, because whenever investors have pitched up at football clubs before, the dominant emotion has usually been hubris. But all the promises of jam tomorrow will count for nothing if the club itself is mishandled and it remains very easy for speculators to wipe their hands of the whole sorry episode if it all goes wrong, leaving others to clean up the messes they’ve left behind.
A gold rush from abroad towards smaller clubs in the pursuit of an international profile comes at the severe risk that those clubs will be treated as disposable if things go badly. But while investment at smaller clubs will always be greeted with open arms and it’s true to say that Tranmere Rovers have been drifting this last few years, things could get a lot worse for them yet. That slow decline could accelerate.
If lower division clubs are going to get flooded with offers from abroad because of the success of Wrexham, it needs to be made clear to the owners that this will be happening on the terms of the game in this country and not on theirs. Because in the event that it does go wrong, we all already know who’ll be called upon to clear up any mess; the people who already pay to watch them in the first place. Whether attention-seeking celebrity lawyers turn out to be geniuses when it comes to running struggling English football clubs remains to be seen, should it even get that far.
The accompanying image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
By Phil Nash from Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 & GFDL.